Ben Thomas

Links from March 2025

4 min read

1: The cap for GPT-4.5 — this is the first time I’m consistently hitting the cap for a new model. Not sure if I’m just using LLMs more in general, or this model’s really good. But I like it.

2: Tax the dirt, with Lars Doucet & Greg Miller — ideas for writing — “the amount of, you know, influence and actual impact on the world you can get for the like spending one weekend of your life just writing, a primer is not the right word. I, I think the world has a lot of 101 level explanations of things… but… our beloved 24 year olds in Washington, they don’t need the 101 level explanation… They need the 201 explanation.”

3: AMA ft. Sholto & Trenton: New Book, Career Advice Given AGI, How I’d Start From Scratch — related, ideas for writing from podcasts — “I think if you’re starting from scratch, there’s two useful hacks. One is podcasting…And two is writing book reviews. Again, because you have something to react to rather than having to come up with a unique worldview of your own.”

4: How to start a nonprofit - Human Readable — speaking of the 201 level explanation.

5: Introducing 4o Image Generation | OpenAI — just for the record.

6: Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being | PNAS Nexus | Oxford Academic — scrolled through this on my phone, though.

7: How to have good taste - by Henry Oliver — “Believing that taste is a primarily personal question means believing that the canon is the canon because lots of people happen to prefer reading revenge tragedies and epic poems about Satan to reading anything else. It means believing that Chaucer is canonical because, much in the way some people prefer reading murder mysteries, many others prefer medieval stories told in iambic pentameter. Writers like Dante and Homer are not canonical because of a wide-spread personal taste for stories about the afterlife told in terza rima or because of a universal penchant for adventure stories with monsters told in hexameters. This is obviously false. The canon has been reapproved every generation because it is full of strange, unique, inventive, insightful work. It challenges us and shows us bigger things in life.” … “Some people don’t want good taste. Fine. Leave them be. There was never an easy way to have good taste. But today if you want to experience the heights of human accomplishment, you can. And much more easily than before. The only thing stopping you, is you.”

8: Having a Go at the St. John’s College “Great Books” Curriculum… — related… so many books, so little time!

9: Announcing Our New $120M Abundance And Growth Fund | Open Philanthropy — “We supported Roots of Progress in its early days and are looking forward to its second annual conference for the Progress Studies community later this year. We think the breadth of this community (see this dispatch from last year’s inaugural conference for example), united around a common purpose of identifying and accelerating the drivers of progress, makes it an important resource to draw on and invest in.”

10: Natal Conference 2025 — “We are living through the greatest population bust in human history.
The future belongs to those who show up.”

11: Lots of great memes this month

12: The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025 — how do I make cool websites?

13: Is this american dynamism?

14: Two years a dad | #289 - Pathless by Paul Millerd

15:

Disclaimer: Something something sharing a link is a recommendation but not necessarily an endorsement or a sign of agreement something something.

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